How to lose weight naturally and permanently without exercising and dieting: the fourth natural way

For many who gain weight due to regular overeating for psychological reasons, I wish to introduce five natural ways to lose weight. Please start with the first episode, in which I discussed why we are not our mind and why our regular overeating has nothing to do with our body’s needs but with our identification with the overeating habit of the mind. In this episode, I am going to discuss the fourth natural way to lose weight; that is, feeling our emotion as it arises. Some of us are emotional overeaters. Regardless of whether we are hungry or not, we follow our mind’s coping strategy and eat compulsively and continually to distract ourselves from unpleasant emotions, such as loneliness, sadness, fear, and anger. We eat to escape from our negative emotions, but our overeating often triggers ensuing negative emotions such as shame and despair. We then eat again to cope with the new ones. This cycles on and results in our steady weight gain. For those of us who overeat to deal with our considered unbearable emotions, to lose weight is to learn how to face such emotions as they emerge, instead of following the mind’s habitual strategy of indulging in foods. First of all, it is important to understand that human emotions are not personal. I discussed in the first episode that we are not our thoughts but the awareness of them. In the same way, we are not our emotions but the awareness of them. Therefore, we need not be afraid of them nor escape from them. Emotions are energy forms passing through our awareness. We suffer not from them but from our desire for them and our fear of them. In reality, when we try to retain or avoid certain emotions, the opposite becomes true. For example, when we are immersed in deep love and suddenly wish this wonderful feeling last forever, we instantly move out from our energy field of love to the conceptual love of the mind. The latter is a thought form devoid of true feeling. On the other hand, when we try to suppress or avoid a negative emotion, we give reality and importance to it and thus retain it in our psyche, from which it will resurface sooner or later. The natural way to live with our emotion is not to move away from it but to move into it, feeling deeply and wholeheartedly into the emotion as it comes up. For example, when you suddenly become anxious, immediately close your eyes, shift your attention to your breath, and then feel deeply into this so-termed anxiety. More often than not, you’ll find that you are not as anxious as you thought, or you may find your anxiety is replaced by a sense of neutrality or even peace. The entire spectrum of human emotions is to be embraced. They facilitate the expansion of our consciousness. By experiencing anger, we become knowingly appreciative of peace. By experiencing sadness, we know we choose joy. Through feeling any emotion, we are guided into our energy field and innate virtuous qualities. Since our energy field is ever present, we are instantaneously in the present moment, free from the mind and its habitual coping strategy of escaping negative emotions through overindulging in foods. In practicality, it is easier and pleasant to feel our emotion than escape from it by devouring foods when we are not hungry. It’s easy because we can feel it effortlessly as it arises. It’s pleasant because often we can feel into our natural qualities such as deep peace. The key here is not to buy into the fear or resistance of the mind but to simply let ourselves feel the emerging emotion. In the silent state of the mind, you will know that you do not need to eat to cope with it, for it has already passed through. Generally, thoughts trigger emotions and sustain them. In most cases, when we free ourselves from negative thoughts, we are free from negative emotions. From time to time, you may find that some emotions cannot be transcended quickly upon feeling them. Perpetuating emotions ask us to inquire and uproot the deep-seated beliefs which uphold them.